


(With Silent Echoes) Your Voice Carries Me

by morganoconner



Series: Mirror Images [3]
Category: Supernatural, Supernatural RPF
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, family by choice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-25
Updated: 2010-12-25
Packaged: 2017-12-18 04:05:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganoconner/pseuds/morganoconner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard takes care of Gabriel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(With Silent Echoes) Your Voice Carries Me

**Author's Note:**

> A long overdue fic for Nia. I hope this is something like you were hoping for, bb! ♥
> 
> This is a continuation of my strange little Mirror Images verse. It probably stands well enough on its own, although if you want to know _how_ Gabriel came to be in this world, you may want to give the first story a quick read first. :) Also, it's been quite a while since I wrote these characters. I hope I've done them justice, and offer my sincerest apologies if I've messed them up too badly. *hides face*
> 
> Many thanks to Miya for the beta!

Later, Richard will spend a long time beating himself up, because he hadn't even noticed anything was wrong at first. He could blame the restaurant, and the fact that it was maybe a little busier and louder than normal. Or he could blame his own fatigue, the fact that he'd been working all week on set and was totally wiped. But the truth is, he hadn't noticed because the idea that there could be anything _to_ notice just hadn't occurred to him. And that's on him.

Gabriel suffering this time is _all_ on him, because he hadn't been paying enough attention to notice that his friend was in trouble.

"Hey, hey," he says, pressing Gabriel into the passenger seat of his car, keeping one hand firm on his shoulder while he crouches down on the ground to get them closer to eye level. "Gabriel, you've gotta breathe. Come on. In and out."

"Can't –" Gabriel gasps, hunching over, arms wrapped tight around his chest. His eyes are squeezed shut now, but Richard remembers what they'd looked like in the restaurant. Remembers the way Gabriel had looked toward him but hadn't seemed to see Richard at all, eyes wide and glassy and unfocused as his breathing got more and more ragged. His heartbeat – the heartbeat Richard has been able to feel as surely as he can feel his own since Gabriel's rebirth – had been going hummingbird-fast.

Richard never realized it was possible for an angel to have a panic attack, but now that he knows, he thinks it should have been obvious. No one – no one who isn't a robot, anyway, and angels aren't robots no matter how much they may try to convince themselves they are – can suffer the sort of trauma these guys have and not have _some_ kind of lingering effects. And Gabriel, well. Gabriel especially is more human than most angels.

"Slow, deep breaths," Richard says softly. He moves his hand from Gabriel's shoulder to his chest, feels how hard his heart is racing there. He takes a deep breath of his own, and then another, something for Gabriel to mimic.

"No," Gabriel whispered. "No, no, can't, I can't –"

"You're okay. Gabriel, you're okay, you're safe and you're here, with me, and you're _fine_." Gabriel clearly isn't fine, but Richard's voice seems to help him, giving him something to focus on besides whatever it is that triggered this. He's shaking his head back and forth like he's trying to get rid of voices only he can hear, but eventually his whimpers start quieting and his breath is slowly, _slowly_ , coming easier.

It takes several long minutes of the two of them sitting there with the car door wide open between them, mirroring each other's breathing and eventually clutching each other's hands, before Gabriel can finally lean back against the headrest and open his eyes. "I'm." He swallows, takes in a deep, ragged breath. "Okay. Ish," he mutters, huffing out a harsh bark of laughter. "Better, anyway." He slides golden-tinted, fatigued eyes towards Richard. "Home now?"

"Yeah," Richard agrees, squeezing Gabriel's hand one last time as he stands. "Home sounds pretty good."

"Sorry to ruin dinner," Gabriel mumbles. Richard ignores that the way he ignores a lot of the more idiotic things Gabriel says.

The ride back to the apartment they share is mostly silent. Gabriel is dozing in the seat, or at least doing a hell of a good impression of it. His left hand is wrapped around the armrest so tight his knuckles are white, but his breathing is calm and even now, and his eyes remain closed every time Richard glances over…which is probably more often than he technically should while he's driving.

Richard reaches over to coax Gabriel's hand away from its death grip on the armrest. Gabriel doesn't so much as twitch, but his fingers come free easily enough and then wrap quick and sure around Richard's, holding on tightly like Richard is his lifeline.

Well, that's okay by Richard. It's not the first time that's been his role for the archangel.

Gabriel blinks himself awake when they reach the building just long enough to make it out of the car, through the door, into the elevator, and up to the fifth floor. Then he crashes hard on the couch even though he has a perfectly good room of his very own, mumbling to himself as he curls up and somehow manages to get comfortable, and doesn't move for the next three hours. By the time he finally does stir again, it's full dark outside and Richard is just beginning to think about taking himself off to bed, although he hates the idea of leaving Gabriel here.

"Watching me sleep, huh, creeper?" Gabriel says, propping himself up on an elbow to blink at Richard, who's sitting on the La-Z-Boy and holding a book that he, admittedly, hasn't read a word of in at least half an hour.

Still, Richard only shrugs. "That panic attack hit you pretty hard. I've never seen it happen before, so I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

"S'not the first time," Gabriel mutters, then flushes and looks away while Richard feels something in his chest go cold.

"Before?" he asks. They both know what _before_ means. "Or since you've been here?" He almost doesn't want to know the answer. Gabriel's been here for six months, and if Richard's missed something like that happening right under his nose, he's not sure he'll forgive himself.

Gabriel sighs, glancing back up at Richard with his mouth quirked unhappily. "Here," he finally answers. "Once or twice."

Which Richard knows is Gabriel-speak for at least five or six times. Jesus. "I'm so sorry," he says, knowing even as he does that it's not enough.

"For what?" Gabriel asks, rolling his eyes and flopping dramatically back against the couch cushions. "For not being as omniscient as my Dad?" He snorts. "Newsflash, bucko, no one is. And I can look after myself."

But he shouldn't have to. Richard promised to look after him, he promised himself and more recently, he promised Castiel. And especially while Gabriel is still getting used to this world and still hasn't regained his full strength, Richard has to –

"Hey. Eyes on me," Gabriel says, snapping his fingers in that irritating way he has. "Stop beating yourself up, or I'll kick your ass and it's not going to be pretty."

Almost against his will, Richard feels his mouth trying to twitch up into a smile. "Okay, then. Compromise – I'll try to stop beating myself up if you try to let me help you now."

Gabriel eyes him. "And how do you propose you'll do that?"

Richard leans back. "Well, I figured we could start by having a conversation."

"We talk all the time," Gabriel says, rolling his eyes again. "How is that supposed to make a difference now?"

"Sometimes I think you're deliberately playing dumb," Richard mutters. "Could you at least tell me what set you off tonight? So I can try and avoid it in the future?"

"It was nothing you did." Gabriel's brows draw together, and he stares hard at the coffee table in front of him. "It's always stupid things, stuff that shouldn't matter. Stuff that reminds me of –" _Home_. He doesn't say the word, but Richard hears it loud and clear all the same. His heart clenches painfully.

"I thought. I mean, you told me you were okay being here. We could still –"

"I don't want to go back," Gabriel cuts in, his eyes suddenly sharp even though his voice is uncharacteristically quiet. "Even if I could – and brother Cas has made it pretty clear that I can't, so it doesn't really matter – I wouldn't want to. But no, I meant… I meant the bad stuff about home. The reasons I left, or hid, or… You know, war. Abandonment. Fire. Lucifer." He shrugs uncomfortably. "That sort of thing. Got a lot of bad memories rattling around up in the old noggin."

Richard is very careful not to allow anything that could be mistakenly construed as pity on his face when he asks, "So what was it tonight?"

"So stupid," Gabriel says, closing his eyes again. "The family next to ours, it was a kid and his dad and his uncle. And the kid, right, he's like eight or nine, getting into mischief, totally my kind of little dude. And the dad's trying to get him to behave, but he's smiling, pretty cool about it, and the uncle just snaps, 'You will do as your father says!'." Gabriel's voice deepens in a mockery of this uncle's, but then he shakes his head, frowning hard. "It wasn't really the words, you know, although I heard the same type of shit often enough from my older brothers. It was the tone though, that righteous indignation that the kid would dare to do otherwise in the first place. The expectation that he _would_ fall into line because he had no power to do otherwise."

Richard has no ability these days to imagine what Heaven must have been like for Gabriel. He'd played around once with making up a backstory for him, back in the days when he thought the archangel was just a character on the page, but he'd decided early on that he didn't really want to know. Didn't want to explore that background too deeply because the character had damn well gotten under his skin enough as it was.

If only he'd known.

Now, he can only say, "That must have sucked," which is at least succinct, if not nearly enough to encompass just how _much_ it much have sucked. But he at least knows it's true – he has enough shit in his own past to know how crappy it is getting sucked back there. Not panic-inducing, not for him, but bad enough.

Gabriel snorts again, giving Richard a _look_. "Don't coddle me, _Dick_. I know it's lame, and it shouldn't set me off like it does. I know. It's just…my brothers, man, they really…"

"They did a number on you," Richard agrees, ignoring both Gabriel's jibe and his ridiculously lacking sense of self-worth. "And that's not coddling, ass, that's common sense. You loved them, and they abused the hell out of you. Family that can do that doesn't deserve the title, I don't care if they're angels of God. They were brothers first, and that should have mattered more."

"I…" Gabriel is staring at him, head tilted so that his eyes catch the light strangely and seem to waver, even as they glow with that faint golden light. "You actually _get_ it," he says. He sounds a little choked. "I always…I tried to…"

Richard can't take this anymore. He abandons his seat and rounds the coffee table to drop down beside Gabriel, pulling him into a rough hug because it's literally the only thing he can think to do. The only thing he _wants_ to do, especially because it's becoming more and more clear that Gabriel hasn't gotten nearly enough hugs in his life. Richard has a lot of time to make up for. "I'm sorry your old family really sucked," he murmurs. "I just…I hope your new family can make up for it a little bit."

Gabriel's hair – longer than Richard ever kept his own, and especially now that Richard's has been cut short for a new role – tickles his nose when Gabriel twitches. There's a suspicious sniff as Gabriel wraps his arms tighter around Richard and buries his face in Richard's shoulder, and there's no verbal reply at all. But really, this is reply enough, to Richard's mind.

Eventually, he realizes that his shoulder is becoming damp, and that's when he decides it's time for bed. "C'mon," he says, tugging Gabriel up and leading him toward his room. "Time for all good little archangels to be in bed."

Gabriel swats at him, but he also produces a watery smile, so Richard considers it a win.

  
~  


"I'm not a child, you know," Gabriel grumbles, freshly showered and looking, as much as he'd hate for Richard to tell him so, a little young and a little lost. He's barefoot, cotton pajama pants brushing against his toes, arms crossed tightly over his chest. Instead of the tank top he usually wears to bed, he's wearing a thin t-shirt that Richard recognizes is one of his own older, more battered ones.

Richard ignores his words and pushes him down on the big king-sized bed, tucking the covers around him carefully.

"Even grown-ups need some taking-care-of sometimes," he tells Gabriel.

Gabriel hesitates for a moment, then reaches out from beneath the fluffy pile of blankets to wrap his fingers around Richard's wrist. "That mean I can get away with asking for a cuddle-buddy for the night?"

Normally, Richard would have a ready quip about teddy bears, but the truth is, he wants to stay. He wants to be there to keep Gabriel grounded and make sure he's really okay, and now that Gabriel's asked, he's not going to jeopardize it by cracking a joke that could get him tossed right back out. So instead, he quirks a small smile and nods, circling the bed so he can crawl in on the other side.

Immediately, Gabriel rolls over and clings to Richard like a particularly warm and snuggly barnacle. For a few long minutes, they relax into the silence, and then Gabriel sighs softly. "Wish you'd been my brother," he mumbles into Richard's arm.

"Me too," Richard says honestly. He never had any siblings to compare the experience to, but there are times when he thinks Gabriel _feels_ like a brother. He knows he'd go to any lengths for the archangel, and that, too, seems like a brotherly feeling to have.

Of course, brothers probably wouldn't be wrapped around each other like this after a tough day, so in some ways, maybe not. But it doesn't matter, anyway. They are what they are, and what they are works for them. _Especially_ if it means Richard can be there for Gabriel after a tough day. Screw easy definitions and 'normal' social standards.

"Maybe tomorrow…" Gabriel hesitates. "Maybe we can call Misha. See if Cas'll be around sometime soon?"

Richard nods. "That's a good idea. If anyone might have some worthwhile advice to give…"

"Yeah."

Richard clears his throat. "Speaking of talking about shit with people. Think you can make me a promise and not keep these panic attacks from me anymore? Or, you know, anytime you could use some help, even if it's just a friendly ear?"

Next to him, Gabriel grumbles, but Richard can tell he's getting sleepier and fading fast. "Fine," he says. "I'll try."

"Not too good at asking for help yet. I know." Richard's arms tighten a fraction, almost without conscious thought.

"Happens when you don't have anyone to ask for help for a few thousand years." Gabriel's words are beginning to slur.

Richard sighs. "You have me now," he says, and then, "Sleep, Gabe."

"Mmkay." Gabriel somehow manages to wriggle closer, and then he's under, breathing even and warm against Richard's arm.

"You have me now," Richard repeats, a whisper this time. A promise.


End file.
